Our friends over at Ocaholic received information from their sources that AMD is working on the Tahiti XTL core based revision of their recently released Radeon R9 280X GPU. The AMD Radeon R9 280X graphic card which was launched earlier this month currently features a rebranded Tahiti XT2 core which is similar to the one featured on the HD 7970 GHz.

AMD Preparing Tahiti XTL Revision of Radeon R9 280X Graphic Card

It isn’t the first time that we are hearing about the Tahiti XTL core since the codename was already revealed back when the R200 was due for release. The Tahiti XTL was supposed to be a refined version of the Tahiti chip compared to the one currently featured on the R9 280X and HD 7970 GHz edition graphic cards. It can be said that AMD hadn’t manufactured a large amount of these chips earlier so it didn’t appeared in any of the models during launch.

AMD is planning to do a running-change with the Radeon R9 280X and offer the Tahiti XTL variant without anyone knowing that the chip has actually been released. The Tahiti XTL chip is supposedly going to end up in various Radeon R9 280X graphic cards in November. No new naming or branding scheme would be introduced by manufacture’s or AMD to differentiate between the Tahiti XTL and Tahiti XT2 based Radeon R9 280X graphic cards which will end up causing slight bit of confusion among the consumer market.

The new Tahiti XTL chip would bring lower power consumption, possibly new features such as AMD TrueAudio and full DirectX 11.2 support and even higher clocks. There would still be a large quantity of Tahiti XT2 chips in the market but those looking for the XTL based cards would have to search through their purchases since their isn’t going to be any differentiating factor between the two variants. Pricing of the Radeon R9 280X will remain unaffected and supply won’t be an issue since AMD always has those left-overs Tahiti XT2 chips to rebrand as the R9 280X graphic card.